Her own little acting dynasty
“I love my gun,” Ming-Na exclaims as a prop man secures a heavy weapon in the holster under her neat, brown jacket.
A name tag identifies her as FBI agent Lin Mei, a member of the investigative team probing the mysterious disappearance of the wife of a U.S. senator from Georgia.
That’s the plotline for the premiere season of “Vanished,” Fox’s new serial thriller, debuting tonight at 9 (KAYU-28, cable channel 3 in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene).
The role is more than a few action sequences away from her previous TV characters: Dr. Deb Chen of NBC’s “ER” and attorney Rachel Lu in the network’s short-lived “Inconceivable.”
“It’s so much fun to have this incredible fantasy of playing this strong, brave woman,” Ming-Na says, chatting between camera setups outside the Paramount Studios sound stage where “Vanished” is produced.
“She is completely opposite of who I am. If there’s just a spider, I’ll run the other way!”
Hard to believe when one considers Ming-Na’s lively persona.
Married to music producer and actor Eric Zee, the 42-year-old mother of two young children laughs heartily when told how young and fit she looks.
“I lead a happy life and I have good genes and my kids keep me young. You only get one life. You have to have a good time!” she says.
Ming-Na, her first name, means “enlightenment” in Chinese, she explains – amused but also frustrated by Americans’ confusion, despite the distinct syllables.
“It still amazes me how people butcher and mix it up … you can say Schwarzenegger but you can’t say Ming-Na,” she laughs.
“What is the problem! Ming-Na, it’s like Ma-Donna,” she teases.
She had kept her father’s name, Wen, even after her mother remarried, but dropped it when she married Zee.
Born in the Chinese territory of Macau, she had little recollection of her father, having moved from nearby Hong Kong to America with her mother when she was a small child.
But about a year ago, she met up with her dad and has stayed in touch.
“It put a lot of pieces of the puzzle together. … He’s a nice guy,” she says.
Her mother wasn’t keen on Ming-Na becoming an actress.
“I think she had this awful preconceived idea that I would have to sleep my way to the top,” she chuckles.
Ming-Na hopes ethnic actors appearing in TV series will become so natural that their roles won’t be necessarily hooked to ethnicity.
“I embrace my culture. I love my culture,” she says. “I love my language. I love my food. It’s all part of me. That’s why my name is still Chinese. I haven’t Anglicized it.
“But, at the same time, what I’ve been really happy about in my career is that I’ve continuously gotten roles that were not specifically written Asian.”
The birthday bunch
Actor-filmmaker-writer Melvin Van Peebles is 74. Singer Kenny Rogers is 68. Actor Clarence Williams III (“The Mod Squad”) is 67. Newsman Harry Smith is 55. Actress Kim Cattrall (“Sex and the City”) is 50. Actress Carrie-Anne Moss (“The Matrix”) is 36. Singer Kelis is 27. Actor Cody Kasch (“Desperate Housewives”) is 19. Actress Hayden Panettiere (“Racing Stripes”) is 17.